


Minor Arcana

by Elizabeth Culmer (edenfalling)



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Divination, Gen, Hogwarts, Minor Canonical Character(s), POV Minor Character, Tarot, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-04-10
Updated: 2004-04-10
Packaged: 2018-02-20 19:38:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,218
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2440499
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/edenfalling/pseuds/Elizabeth%20Culmer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Daphne Greengrass makes a Tarot deck.  (Companion fic to <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/2440562">Means to an End</a>.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Minor Arcana

**Author's Note:**

> This is a little story about NEWT level Divination, which came to me because I miss my Tarot deck. The Rider-Waite deck is real. The Rainbow Tarot deck is made up, and has nothing to do with any potentially real deck by that name.
> 
> Back when I started writing [Secrets](http://archiveofourown.org/works/882572/chapters/1699723) \-- my retelling of CoS from Ginny's perspective -- we knew very little about other students in Harry's year. Our best evidence was a list Rowling showed briefly in an interview. One name on that page was Queenie Greengrass, a Slytherin. In OotP, there is a character named Daphne Greengrass who takes her practical Charms OWL at the same time as Hermione. Presumably these are meant to be the same person.
> 
> I used her as a very minor supporting character, partly to fill out the membership in Professor Sprout's evening Herbology sessions, and partly to play up the theme of Ginny's prejudice against Slytherins. Later I wrote a couple other stories about her, because Slytherins aren't a monolithic block. I kept her name as Queenie when I was revising and finishing [Secrets](http://archiveofourown.org/works/882572/chapters/1699723) in 2013, since I already had a major female Slytherin character named Daphne -- Ginny's chosen antagonist, Daphne Rumluck -- but I've changed it here for canon compliance.

Daphne Greengrass studies Divination. Not because she's a Seer -- which she isn't -- or because she admires Trelawney -- which she absolutely doesn't -- but because she likes the uncertainty, the ambiguity of readings. Other forms of magic are too definite, too easily made mundane.

Daphne thinks magic ought to be, well... magical.

Of course, there's also the possibility of finagling a lucrative career as a diviner, called in to predict the success of business ventures and love affairs alike. And the uncertainty can only be a benefit there; divination's as much about reading your supplicant as about reading the future.

Daphne's always been good at reading people. She's a Slytherin. She's _supposed_ to be clever and underhanded.

So here she is, working on her special project for NEWT level Divination. She's one of only six left in the class, and Trelawney told them to seek out what called to them from beyond the veil. Lavender Brown is charting maddeningly detailed horoscopes for her entire family back seven generations. Parvati Patil is working on fire readings and tasseomancy; she has a theory that the heat involved in making tea makes the leaf pictures related to fire images. Terry Boot is learning how to make, cleanse, and enchant crystal balls. Justin Finch-Fletchley is pestering everyone in seventh year for palm readings, to cross-check against the events of their Hogwarts years. Margaret Nott is carving her own set of rune stones and has been sticking her fingers with a needle the past week as she sews and embroiders a silk bag to hold them.

And Daphne is drawing her own set of Tarot cards.

She's always liked Tarot best of the paths Trelawney teaches. On the one hand, the cards are reassuringly solid, and there's no question about whether or not you see them laid on the table. On the other hand, there are infinite patterns in which to lay them and dozens of ways to interpret their meanings, based on their position, their relationship to other cards, and the images themselves. Tarot is full of ambiguities.

She's drawn the Minor Arcana, all four suites and their royal houses. She's based her images loosely on the Rider-Waite deck, but she's added vines and flowers and turned the staves into spears. In Daphne's experience, life is full of unexpectedly entangling and sharp experiences, and she wants her deck to reflect that. Each suite tells a story: love and marriage for Cups, voyage and return for Staves, apprenticeship to mastery for Pentacles, and death and rebirth for Swords. The round suites show a one-track path, while the pointed, linear suites show a circular path; the irony appeals to her.

Now she faces the Major Arcana. The Fool is first, of course, but she skips that card for the moment. Instead, she starts with the Magician. Traditionally this card is male, but Daphne draws a woman instead; it's her deck, after all, a representation of herself, and she is the master of these cards. The face flows from her pencil -- quills are useless for drawing, and she's willing to use Muggle inventions in certain cases -- but she stalls for a while over the hand. The Magician reaches upward from the lower right corner, stretching her hand to grasp the wand that floats in the middle air. A knife hangs at her side, a cauldron rests on the table before her, and a pentacle blooms in the vines above her head.

But the wand doesn't quite fit. She's changed the other suite symbols -- sword to knife, cup to cauldron, heavy coin-shaped pentacle to an airy construct of leaves -- but the wand isn't right. It wants to be a spear, a more obvious, physical weapon.

Daphne frowns. The Magician represents mastery, balance, achieved power. She doesn't need brute force to defend herself. Yet this deck, her own deck, is telling her to draw a spear.

Frustrated, Daphne sets aside her work and starts to deal a five-card spread with her battered Rainbow Tarot deck, the one her aunt gave her for her twelfth birthday. She still thinks the rainbows are silly, but by now the deck is attuned to her thoughts and serves as a useful clarifying tool, though it tends to only show the bright side of the future.

But before she can lay more than the first card, the Querent, she stops. She meant to use the Queen of Swords as her signifier, but she pulled the Queen of Staves. Daphne frowns. Swords are more suitable for her, she thinks -- her hair is dark, her temperament moody. And yet she drew the Queen of Staves. And in this deck, the suite is most definitely Staves, not Wands.

She flips over the next card, the Problem. Eight of Swords. A woman stands blindfolded in a field, a solitary rainbow glimpsed through the clouds. Eight swords surround her, and in her blindness one has pierced her foot. A tiny rainbow glints off the bloodstained metal. Failure, bad news, conflict, deception. Something is blinding her, and she won't get anywhere until she clears it up.

Well, why else would she be asking how to clear it up? Sometimes the cards can be far too literal.

Daphne flips the Help, the Hindrance, and the Solution in quick succession. The Hanged Man, the High Priestess reversed, and the Ace of Staves. Taken together, it seems to say that insight and discernment will help her, while she herself is her greatest obstacle, particularly what she thinks she already knows. But in the end she'll reach a new beginning, something filled with creativity (and possibly a nice fortune as well).

So then. What does she think she knows? The Magician represents balance and mastery, and as such has no need for a weapon such as a spear. Yet she wants to draw one on the card. And she represented herself as the Queen of Staves instead of Swords... and since she's not particularly friendly or chaste, that probably relates to her spear issue (though the love of money is spot on without any deep analysis).

The Magician is a woman, to represent Daphne herself, to stamp her personality onto her new deck. The Magician represents balance.

The Magician represents balance!

Of course. And you can't forget the physical, and mastery implies more than just a knowledge of magic. Of course the Magician needs a weapon, needs something that's of no use in magic whatsoever. Daphne sweeps up her old cards, shuffling them absently and replacing them in their battered velvet pouch.

The spear should be standing tall, planted in the earth like a staff to support the Magician. Perhaps a banner tied near the point? Something to snap in the wind and wind sinuously like the vines in the upper right... yes, that should work.

Trelawney may not think this the most traditional of Tarot decks, but she'll have no call to complain about the care Daphne's put into the symbolism. And it will give marvelous readings; she can feel that already, feel the magic seeping into the stiff-backed, charmed parchment rectangles that lie in an untidy heap by her side. If they don't always come out clear at first, well, what foretelling ever does? Figuring out the uncertainties is half the fun.

Daphne bends over her sketching, confident again in her future.


End file.
